Unfortunately, I decided to put this book down about 25% in. I enjoy the unique style, but was completely unable to connect with the main character and plot because of it. The premise was intriguing, but the stylistic choices prevented me from fully immersing myself in the plot and becoming invested in the story's outcome. I will not post this review on any other site because I did not finish the book, and feel that sharing my opinion would be unfair to the author.

I first read The Gameshouse when it was released as three novella eBooks: The Serpent, The Thief and The Master. I loved the story then, and it has stuck with me ever since. The release of the omnibus edition gave me an excuse to give it a second look. This is a really good book, and just more evidence of why Claire North is a must-read author.

In The Serpent, readers are introduced to the eponymous Gameshouse. We meet Thene, a woman trapped in a forced marriage to a drunk. She's an interesting guide to this world, albeit one who feels a bit cold and aloof (understandable, when we learn of her past). That is, until she becomes more involved in the Gameshouse...

After frequenting the Gameshouse, and engaging in “standard” contests and games for a while, she is approached by the umpires, who invite her to play in the "higher league". The games are no longer confined to boards and table-tops. Now, Thene finds herself playing a game in which the city of Venice is the board, and its inhabitants are the pieces. Each player is given a selection of pieces -- people who are indebted to the Gameshouse for some reason or another. The first part -- what was the novella The Serpent -- serves as an excellent introduction to this world, and shows readers how it all operates.

The story then jumps to inter-War Thailand, in The Thief. North really brings this setting to life (I was born in Bangkok, so I’m always interested to see how people recreate the city on the page, even in times when I have no way of knowing first-hand). I think North has done a wonderful job of recreating such a rich and colourful city, and also does justice to the rural/wilder regions of the country.

Our player/protagonist, Remy Burke, is more established and experienced than Thene in Venice, with centuries of experience. A drunken evening has led him into a game of hide-and-seek against an extremely determined rival. After fleeing the city, Remy struggles through the jungle, occasionally benefiting from the kindness of strangers, while at other times suffering betrayal and setbacks. Remy is resourceful and a quite ingenious player of the Game. (I gave a little cheer at the end of this part.)

The final part, The Master, which I won't dwell on in order to avoid spoilers, brings the story up-to-date, and builds into a massive confrontation between players. The Gameshouse has developed and evolved with the times, and expanded the scope of the individual games and wagers available to players. It's such an interesting and fascinating concept. In theory, there is also great scope for writing multiple stories within this world and setting. I understand why North hasn't written any more, but I would certainly snap up another story or two set within the rules of the Gameshouse.

Over the course of the book, we get a number of glimpses at the Gameshouse's history and origins, and the occasional nod to what might be to come. After finishing, readers will notice things that maybe seemed disconnected from events come into clearer focus. It's quite the twisting tale, and I think North pulls it off with great style.

Also: that ending! Fantastic.

In each of North's novels has displayed the author's incredible gift for characterization, dialogue and exposition. Everyone we meet in her novels is three-dimensional, whether primary protagonists or peripheral characters. The Gameshouse has a good sized cast, and they're all fascinating. The plot across this book is tight and focused; the atmosphere and environs colourfully described and brought to life, while never in excess or through over-long info-dumps.

If you haven't read anything by North yet, then I would strongly recommend you do so. She is easily one of the best writers working today. The Gameshouse would be a great place to start, as would her superb debut, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

Very highly recommended.

Regardless of the fact that Cat is a friend & has written for my Djinn anthology, I will always maintain that she is a stellar writer of great intelligence & sensitivity.

The Gameshouse is a a dark, complex, fantasy world where the games of chance hold the fate of the empire. I couldn't be more happy to see this collection of 3 short novels wrapped up into one impactful novel.

This book is a RIDE and I loved it I admit at first it can be kinda hard to get into. There's a lot of information thrown at you, but there's not much happening BUT when this book gets into its paces it FLIES by. I got so wrapped up in the mystery and intrigue of the plot. I really like that Claire North gives you just enough to keep you interested but not enough to make this predictable.

The cast of characters are colourful and fun. Both hero and villain wise. Our heroes are easy to get behind, with realistic motivations, that makes you root for them even when they're doing bad. I think the villains are also done so well here. They've also given some depth but you totally loathe them.

Above all, Claire North NAILED atmosphere. The city has such a tangible presence because Claire North uses such detailed and interesting description to bring her setting to life. This made the entire setting so vivid in my mind and for me, world building is actually kind of a big deal. The division of the city, and how the politics between each division affected the city and characters was really interesting too and I appreciated how well thought out and detailed it was. All in all, I freaking enjoyed this immensely and highly recommend the read.

Though Claire North’s The Gameshouse collects three novellas previously only available as ebooks, it works quite beautifully as a novel in three parts. The obvious through line is the titular setting itself—an ancient, occult place that tugs the strings of history via its dicing—but there is a deeper game at play

When we first enter the Gameshouse, it is a 17th Century Venetian gaming hell. We follow a woman, Thene, into the gambling den, where she is taken by a hateful husband who seeks to crack her icy quiet with his depravity. He married her for money to go along with his own ancient title and new poverty, and has since squandered both their marriage and her wealth. She begins to play, first tentatively and inexpertly, but her confidence and skill grow. In time, she taken up into the upper levels of the Gameshouse to meet the Gamesmaster, a woman in white behind a white mask, who invites her to play for the higher leagues and at larger stakes.

The games carried out below are common, legible ones, played between people on a table—chess and cards, mahjong and shogi; their winnings are tangible. In the upper leagues, the board opens up onto the world, as the doors in the Gameshouse open impossibly to cities all over the globe. Thene will play a game of kings against three other players. The board is Venice. Each player must position their king to be elected to the Supreme Tribune (a place of some importance in the complex politics of Venice). At their disposal are pieces, people who are in hock, in one way or another, to the Gameshouse: a bureaucrat, a nun, a courtesan, others. Whoever wins will be inducted into the higher league; the rest will become pieces in other players’ games. Thene dons a white mask, like the Gamesmaster herself, and begins.

The second game starts with less preamble. Remy Burke, a journeyman player with the Gameshouse for half a century, awakens in his hotel room in Bangkok in 1938 with a wicked hangover and the creeping realization he made a bad wager while drunk. Abhik Lee—new to the upper leagues and ambitious—first wore Burke down with drink, then challenged him to a game of hide-and-seek, which seems innocuous enough at first. But like most upper league games, the stakes are more substantial than money or land: if Remy loses, he forfeits his memories; if he wins, he takes 20 years from Lee. Remy has 20 minutes to pull it together before Lee starts to seek him. When tagged, Remy becomes the seeker. Whoever hides the longest wins. The board is all of Thailand.

Remy’s hand in this game is woefully weak: he’s over six feet tall, looks obviously foreign in Thailand, and cannot access any of his pieces outside the country. Lee can pass for Thai and holds dozens of pieces in government, organized crime, monasteries, and constabularies. Though Remy is resigned to his own bad judgement in accepting this game with these restrictions—it was his choice, drunk or not—that the Gameshouse allowed such an unbalanced game is troubling. The white-robed umpires have intervened before in games less obviously tilted. Remy is helped out of the hotel by a player we’ve met before, a man known as Silver. He played chess with Thene before she began her game of kings, prodding her gently with questions about the nature of the game, of all games. He’s got a young man’s face, but he’s rumored to be older than any player save the Gamesmaster herself.

Thene’s section has an almost stately sense about it—deliberate and political, but occasionally, suddenly bloody—its tone matched to 17th Century Venetian politics; Thene wears a mask, but underneath, she roils. Remy’s headlong hurtle through Bangkok and out into the Thai countryside is breathless and tense, the entire section fraught as he clambers through jungles and hides in outbuildings, hungry, cold or hot, bitten by insects, broken and bleeding. His experience on the board matches Thailand in 1938, on the cusp of war, with a weather eye turned to the colonial powers, the French and the English, and the imperial Japanese. Thailand’s place on the world stage is precarious; it stands out like Remy. Both narratives are sunk in the history of their places, but don’t get distracted overmuch by the detail of the board. It is just the board, after all, but topography matters.

Then we begin to see the larger game, the one between Gamesmaster and player, between storyteller and reader. The perspective of the three stories is odd: there is a we—a you and I—which lingers after the meeting to see one player’s private reaction, or addresses (parenthetically) the fates of minor characters, or pulls back for long shots of the play. It is something like first, second, and third person all rolled into one, both omniscient and withholding, shifting as the story/game requires. North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, 84K) favors high concepts fantasy novels that take their premises quite seriously indeed. The Gameshouse is both literary and fantastic, and the games within both deadly serious and playful.

The coin turns.

The Gameshouse was originally published as a novella trilogy: The Serpent, The Thief and The Master, available as e-books only. Now, for the first time, the trilogy is being released together, and despite the very different protagonists and tones to each volume in this series, it's an experience that benefits from being taken altogether, allowing the overarching plot to be experienced immediately and without breaks. Plus, with its action thriller tones, its hard to pull away from this novel-sized experience once you're in its grip.

The stories all revolve around the titular Gameshouse - a place which appears to exist outside time and space, where things mundane, intangible and world-defining can be won and lost over a wide variety of games. From personal questions to political positions to chronic illnesses to "appreciation for the taste of strawberries", everything is up for wager over games ranging from snap to Mortal Kombat, and it is expected that every game must have a stake of some kind. Players dabble in the lower league until, rarely, they are invited to win a place amongst the higher-ups, where the stakes are higher and players can apparently continue for centuries. The backdrop of the Gameshouse seems to present a set of unifying rules against which the world is run, but we soon find that this world isn't quite as objective as it seems; that control of the Gameshouse is itself a game which is about to come to an interesting conclusion.

We are first introduced to the Gameshouse in medieval Venice, where Thene, a Jewish woman who has been married off to an abusive debtor husband, finds an escape there when she's invited by a silver-haired stranger to play. She is soon able to surpass her husband and catch the notice of higher level players, and accepts a place in a game of "Kings", where she and three others must compete to get their candidate elected as the new Tribune of Venice. The victor will be inducted into the higher level players at the Gameshouse, while the losers are barred from the institution overall. As she starts playing the hand she's been dealt - each "card" corresponding to humans who have, one way or another, come into the debt of the Gameshouse and are now serving to pay it off - Thene starts to explore the metagame beyond the rules of her particular engagement, realising that the candidate selection, her hand and the relative skills of the other players all add up to a game whose scales have been tipped in favour of others. As a Jewish woman in 1600's Venice playing against three men, and controlling the fate of a fourth, we already expect Thene to be an underdog who faces prejudice even in the relative escape of the Gameshouse, but watching her uncover how the board has likely been weighted and try to understand why is just as satisfying as her plays in the game itself. Thene is just naive enough to be likeable in a cutthroat world - not realising the stakes for some of her "pieces", for example - without ever being irritating. While it wraps up the game, Thene's story also give s us flashes of a wider story behind the Gameshouse, particularly through a distinct third-person narrator who clearly knows more than they are letting on.

Centuries after Thene, several of the same players return for The Thief,, which takes us to 1900s Bangkok and to, of all things, a game of hide and seek between two of the Gameshouse's elite. The protagonist, Remy Burke (a six foot European whose inability to blend in in the Thai countryside is a bit of a hindrance) wakes up after a heavy night of drinking, only to be told that one of the many things he doesn't remember about his previous night was agreeing to a game from an up-and-coming player called Abhik Lee. Moreover, Remy has bet his own memory, which is bad news both for him as a person and for the balance of the Gameshouse, where other players will struggle to deal with a player who has not only his own experience but the stolen gifts of an even older rival. Down on his luck and unprepared for any engagement, Remy nevertheless manages to get out and begin a desperate escape across rural Thailand, all the while trying to work out how the game has been allowed to go ahead in the first place. Like Thene's story, the metagame is as important as the game, and even without specific resources to deploy, Remy basically ends up thinking of all the individuals he meets as "pieces" to be used, even when he ends up making at times quite personal connections with some of them. Once again, the resolution of this hide and seek game leaves a lot unresolved in terms of how it came about, but it's quite a neat ending that remains true to Remy's desperation and the sense of weighted odds while being quite clever.

The unanswered questions of Thene and Remy's stories inevitably come back in the final novella, The Master, which raises the stakes as high as they can go. As we've been expecting since The Serpent, the series narrator takes centre stage here - in the process revealing themself and the common role they've played in each story, although this isn't particularly hard to guess - and recounts the story of a challenge to the Gamesmaster herself. The ensuing match spans years and continents, bringing down governments and criminal forces alike in a match whose ultimate goal is to find and capture, or kill, the other player. It's intriguing to watch the narration shift from an intrusive but distant third person to a first person perspective at the same time that the rotating cast of characters gets even less invested in and more quickly used and discarded. Despite bringing the trilogy to an interesting close, however, The Master worked least well of the three novellas in terms of my interest in its main story and emotional beats, because the protagonist is so institutionalised into the Gameshouse that their motivations for bringing it down, despite being revealed as deeply emotional, just aren't on a level that really resonates with the reader, especially given the scale of carnage.

And I think that's where the big "your Mileage may vary" element comes in to this trilogy: the way the Gameshouse treats its characterisation divides the world into players and pieces, even if the players in one game might be pieces in another, and caring about the use and fate of pieces beyond their utility is considered to be optional at best. There's a big assumption about how power accumulates and what it can be made to do which pervades the novels, and while there's technically an alternative - the ideology of chance, represented by another ancient character - this doesn't get much exploration and the eventual question of "is chance kinder than process" isn't truly unpacked. From the death of Thene's initial piece, which serves as a wake-up call for her even if it doesn't change her eventual trajectory the stakes escalate to tens, if not hundreds, of people being killed at once as collateral in a skirmish between two hidden people with little remark. We're locked into reading about a deeply unfair, weighted system which toys with people's lives as if the harm and the glamour are inseparable (an effect which gets even stronger when reading about colonial players in Thailand, or the global networks in The Master - a subject which could be an entire essay on its own) and these stories just don't have much alternative to offer beyond a shrug despite the amount of narrative energy spent showing up the flaws in how things are currently done.

The extent to which this aspect frustrates, however, will depend very much on what you're coming to The Gameshouse for, and if you're coming for thriller plots and action in the context of an engaging conspiratorial conceit, you're going to find those elements executed extremely well. Each of the novella-thirds is plotted extremely tightly, mysteries of the world aside, and at least in The Serpent and The Thief, the protagonists come across as likeable and competent even as they're being outplayed or struggling to make their hands work most of the time, with reversals that come suddenly but satisfyingly to pull things off. And, indeed, the fact that the Gameshouse doesn't have answers to its own questions seems on many levels to be a deliberate one, particularly given the way the overarching narrative ends. Is it valid to critique a work for a point it was never trying to make, or where the loose ends are the point? Maybe - or maybe that's just what the players want me to think? While I try to untangle myself from the webs of unknown influence guiding this review, you consider going to check out the Gameshouse next time you're after twisty - if slightly detached - speculative political thriller.